Nothing malicious or nefarious involved here. Another user of that reader forum went after my point of view aggressively and using the built in flagging/reporting mechanism was able to have my account banned. Now when I attempt to re-register a new account I am recognized and blocked.
I should be more precise. I don’t “know” with certainty but I strongly suspect. I should also have mentioned that this happens with both of my email accounts (Proton and Tutanota). Both Proton and Tutanota allow me to use email aliases, which I have done, but they don’t mask the underlying IP address.
The CBC News - Latest Canada, World, Entertainment and Business News site requires an email address and user created password to register a new account. It then sends an email to the supplied email address with a button to click to confirm that email address.
As far as I have been able to determine, the platform for the user comments forum used by CBC is licensed from viafoura.com and the registration and moderation service on that platform is provided by something called ICUC Social.
Using the connection setup I described in my original post I am able to create a new account. However, within a few hours, sometimes within about a day, when I try to login the account is blocked and I receive a message saying your account has been banned permanently. Also, sometimes after I have logged into my account it will be blocked and deactivated while I’m logged in. I some cases that happens before I have posted any comments so the blocking/banning cannot be because of the content of what I posted.
Bump: This is still happening. I checked on ipchicken and saw that my ivpn address is different than my real IP address. Also when I check ipchicken from tor browser my address is different again from the ivpn address and from my real IP address.
See above re: the process CBC uses to verify a sign up email address for its site. It sends an email to whichever of my email accounts I designate and requires a response to that email in order to complete registration. Is that the process that is giving away my real IP address? I have used both proton and tutanota and got the same result.
That’s how things are supposed to work, when you visit an IP checker site from behind VPN you will obviously see the IP you selected but when you then add TBB on top it will cause sites to show an IP different to your VPN because the last hop of the connection is handled by an exit node rather than the VPN.
If you go to check.torproject.org behind VPN you will get a message saying you aren’t connected to Tor and it will show your VPN IP. Open TBB and go to the same site, it will give a message saying you’re connected to Tor along with the exit node IP.